US under pressure over CIA prisoner transport
BERLIN: The United States came under mounting pressure on Sunday to explain reports of secret stopovers at European airports by CIA planes allegedly carrying terror suspects to covert prison camps. Germany and Switzerland joined a chorus of nearly a dozen European countries that are probing US spy agency flights for prisoners reportedly subjected to extra-judicial detention and possibly torture.
New German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, due in Washington on Tuesday, said he was troubled by the reports but would reserve judgment until Washington offered its take on the accounts.
"What we have read is in fact grounds for concern," Steinmeier said in an interview with the weekly Bild am Sonntag. Steinmeier welcomed a request for information from the US administration made last week by his British counterpart Jack Straw.
"A foreign minister must evaluate the facts and not newspaper reports," he said. Germany has already opened an investigation into a case in which an Egyptian suspect was reportedly secretly transported via Ramstein in western Germany, the largest US air base in Europe.
Public broadcaster ZDF and several newspapers have reported that more than 80 secret Central Intelligence Agency flights touched down in Germany en route to secret detention centers. ARD, another public television channel, said that at least one German security agency had been aware of CIA detainee transports via Germany.
The government coordinator for transatlantic relations, Karsten Voigt, told the Handelsblatt business daily that Germany must not violate its own justice system in the fight against terror.
"We must ensure that we do not give up our own values and the principles of the rule of law in combating criminal persons," he said in an interview to be published Monday.
German officials from across the political spectrum urged Steinmeier to take up the issue in talks with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the White House national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, in Washington.
Meanwhile Switzerland has asked the United States to explain 27 overflights by American planes in 2003 and 2004, the foreign ministry in Bern said.
"Switzerland addressed its concern to the American State Department in mid-November," said Carine Carey, a ministry spokeswoman, confirming a report in the SonntagsZeitung newspaper.
The Swiss government wants to know if detainees were transported on those flights and three other stopovers at the airport in Geneva, said Carey, adding that the ministry had not yet received a response from Washington.
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Daniel Goering, a spokesman for the Swiss federal civil aviation office told AFP that two US planes of "a specific registration" had flown over Switzerland 27 times.
He said that one of the planes on a flight from Geneva to Washington flew over Switzerland 18 times and made two landings at Geneva, while the other plane, on a flight from Prague to Washington with a stopover in Geneva, flew over Switzerland nine times.
A number of European countries have opened inquiries into alleged CIA plane landings, including Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden, as well as Morocco.
The Council of Europe opened a probe last week, but top investigator privates Marty of Switzerland conceded Saturday that he had "practically no methods of constraint" to stop the flights to change CIA methods.
The Washington Post reported this month that the CIA was holding suspects from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group in prisons in eight countries including Thailand, Afghanistan and "several democracies in eastern Europe".
US-based independent watchdog Human Rights Watch said later it was "practically convinced" that such centers existed, at least in Poland and Romania.
